Benefits are the Reason that Your Customers Buy your Product

A benefit is an outcome that your customers find attractive or desirable. It's that simple.

Customers don't (normally) purchase products for their features, or for their look, alone. Features and fashion can be discriminators for purchase - the customer may buy the better looking or sounding item. But most rational people buy products for the benefit that the item gives to them.

Selling Software to Consumers

Consumers want to buy things, but they can do without things, too. You must cater to the consumer's preferences and desires.

Personal products are generally purchased because the customer wants the benefit offered by the product.

Examples: The consumer prefers to play a game, vs. not playing a game. The consumer prefers to learn French before taking a trip, rather than not learning French.

Sell using intangible qualities: social status, well-being, vitality, fun, increased knowledge and well roundedness, less messy life or house, more leisure time.

Sell to consumers by using aspirations and emotions.

How Consumers Typically Purchase Software

Consumers usually purchase software from a web site, a print ad (more rarely these days), or a mailed promotion (very rare these days.) The marketing material itself delivers the mechanism used for selling to consumers.

The software vendor generally doesn't use its employees to solicit individual customers directly. For instance, if your consumer product is priced to sell at $29.95, you simply cannot afford the expense of employing a telemarketer to sell it directly.

Direct response marketing (explained below) is widely used in consumer software sales. Very effective direct response copywriting is key when selling software to consumers.

What is Direct Response Marketing?

Direct response marketing is key to B2C (business-to-consumer) sales.

Direct response literally means that the consumer takes action in order to purchase your product, and your business does not reach out to individual customers (by telemarketing or in-person visits) to solicit their business.

Specific techniques and tools used in direct response marketing include: post cards, toll free ordering lines, infomercials, online ordering forms and shopping carts, "long copy" sales letters, and "squeeze pages" that strongly encourage a prospect to sign up for a mailing list or for a demonstration or a sample, and which gives you permission to market more actively to them.

Selling Software to Businesses

Business and professional products are generally purchased because the customer really needs the benefit offered by the product.

Examples: the business really needs to reduce certain expenses or else it can't meet payroll and will otherwise have to lay employees off . Or, the business really needs to enter a new market, and without entering that market, their present lines of business will not allow the business to stay solvent.

How Businesses Typically Purchase Software

Businesses generally need a particular benefit or outcome and are willing to pay for it. But they can pick and choose whom to buy from. Be prepared.

Direct response techniques such as online ordering forms are used when selling low-priced (under $1000) business products and services, as well as subscriptions to services such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

Higher priced business products, as well as enterprise level software systems, are sold almost exclusively through personal outreach and contact, using telemarketing ("cold calling") and in-person site visits.

Marketing copy takes on a different role in business-to-business (B2B) sales than in business-to-consumer (B2C) sales.

Generally, you can't expect a customer to purchase a $4000-$10000 software product by using an online ordering form. This role is filled by live salespeople.

So B2B marketing of high-cost software provides the informational background that allows your prospect to qualify your product for their use.

In short, B2B marketing uses effective copy to make the case that you understand the customer's challenge or situation and that you have created and are selling a solution to their challenge.

B2B marketing copy shows that your company has a "brain" and that you are a provider of a solution that can help your prospect.

The Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

The Unique Selling Proposition or "USP" states the logic behind your own product or service in an objective way.

Your USP essentially states to the customer that you understand what they really need, and that you are able to sell it to them.

It is absolutely essential that your business to business (B2B) product have an associated USP that your customers will value.

The USP can sometimes also work in consumer software product sales, where there is an objective "good" to be gained by the purchaser.

What is a USP? In short, the USP is a proposition (a statement) to your prospects that makes a unique claim that competition cannot offer or which is not often made in your industry segment, and which is so strong and persuasive that it can motivate your prospects to become paying customers.

Example of USP

Federal Express dominated package shipping for years with the slogan: "Federal Express: When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." This is the most-used example of a strong USP.

How Can I Help You?

I hope that you have better insight into common practices in B2C and B2B software marketing after reading this page.

If you need a writer who can understand your product, and what you're trying to do for your customers, and who can communicate your message effectively to your customers, then I am your writer.

If you need solid product copy that turns prospects into believers, then please call or write: Don Wallace, at 513-932-2236; email don@donwallacewriting.com, or use this contact form, at your earliest convenience.